Wednesday, 27 May 2015

Martes 26: D.F. lunchtime

I previously recorded a little of 9am. By lunchtime the air risen from around 15c overnight to 25 and as we walked through an hour or so, humidity beginning to rise towards showers or evening storm.

We headed south with two objectives: to get Helen some cold medicine from the Farmacia 'Paris' in Avenida Republica de el Salvador and shop at the Mercado San Juan famous as source of food from the world as well as locally for meals at home (dealing with a very unusual diet issue, not afraid of food out).

In a district with many offices, on the way to el Salvador 95, some smart looking persons going out for lunch.

and the modern global phenomenon of smokers perching on the ledge

Before we got to Farmacia Paris, we bought herbal on the street. Easy to buy for two: for Helen something for a cold caught in San Francisco, for me, a blend seeming to cover all other disorders of mind and body. These big bags (use just two teaspoons or so for a mug of tea) cost $MEX30 each. Mexico uses the $ sign for the peso, as I write $MEX = $AU2.50.

The Farmacia Paris is elegant.

We found ourselves first in the homeopathy department.

... the smaller conventional department just along the street labelled alopatia.

We then headed west for the market along Salvador, which became louder and busier. There is specialisation in products in different street districts in the Centro Historico. Had we gone west a longer distance we would have entered an area of Jewish and Lebanese immigration where the family of world's richest man Carlos Slim began to amass its fortune. Coming west it was, with constant amazing interleaving of history, wisdom, museums, etc, electronics all the way.

At the Eje Central, what does seem the normal array of police on the side roads from this 'Central Axis'. I suspect it's boring and thankless work for people who live in other parts of the city. I asked the sergeant of this squad which way to the market, he shrugged and said he had no idea.

Two blocks west, there are three things: the San Juan Artisans' Market, the San Juan park and the Mercado Carnes Exoticas.

We bought beef, chicken, vegetables.

The beef we bought from the gentlemen of La Olivia

From the market we plunged north into Victoria and a world of laiting

if you did not recognise the word laiting you surely now have illuminacion!

turning back east and north again along the Eje Central it gets even busier

... and we arrive back where we first walked from the Metrobus, this the crossing of the Eje Central at Francesco Madero. A policeman with a yellow jacket is a busy man.

Here in the middle of the day as not before dawn, we look up to the Torre Latinamericano and the increasing humidity of the afternoon.

Variously people wait to cross the Eje... if you can draw your eyes away you will see a corner of the Palacio di Bellas Artes just to the north...

lights change and with the added force of manner and whistle of the policeman in yellow

cars stop and we plunge across

and past the line of policia auxiliar whose task looks really miserable in the daylight.
Tis but the church spire of St Francis he has on top of his head.

...and we approach the fabled Casa de los Azulejos. The fable goes that a Spanish nobleman said to his useless playboy son a commonplace utterance of derision: "You couldn't build a house of tiles."
And so in the way of sons irritated and doubtless meeting also a clear need for a deep pocket, he built a House of Tiles. We did not go in for lunch, we had shopping from the market to get home, another block or two.

and almost home, we are back in a world of executive life, tourists, including those in the Australian uniform of work safety jacket stamped with the name of a pilgrimage company, the leader with a religious flag

past bronze musicians

and if you look just there above to the right and in the corners of pictures to come, you will see that had my old shoe laces lasted in the Estados Unidos [EE UU] where the shoelace was elusive, I would have been bedazzled by choice here.

We had come down the California coast through Humboldt County and among the intellectual and social tendrils of Humboldt University and we e...

Aztec Venus: Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli

"...the ancient Mexicans had calculated accurately that the orbits of the earth (c.365 days), the moon (c.260 days) and Venus (c.584 days) come together only once every 104 years (two Aztec ‘bundles of years’ or centuries’). Their knowledge of time and its cycles was truly stunning."

This was a place to store resources before travelling, then came live in Mexico on 26 May 2015

I find a blog concentrates the mind while travelling, Unlike our blogs of travel to Italy and Japan, I'm not familiar with Mexico, but increasingly aware of the immense social, political and historical complexity. So this blog begins well before we depart...

Some reading resources on the education reform issues sparking vioence and the drug war